Summary

• Historically, First Nations in B.C. who lived near floodplains respected tides and lived nomadically, until settlers disrupted water flow, creating dikes to pursue agriculture and urban development.
• Xwíʔləm̓nəc, or Addington Point Marsh, has been restored to a wetland after three years of collaboration led by Katzie First Nation.
• Restoring wetlands brings life to countless species and helps restore Indigenous people’s connection to their traditional territories. The marsh is part of Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed.

On a late April morning, a group of Katzie First Nation land guardians, conservation workers, government representatives and others trek down to Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Addington Point Marsh).

They gather in the First Nation’s Lower Mainland territory to celebrate the long-awaited completion of a wetland restoration project connecting to the Stó:lō (Fraser River).

Mike Leon leads Katzie’s team of eight guardians, and has been involved with the marsh restoration project from the beginning. After everyone bypasses a locked gate — there to reduce the risk of bear-human encounters — they stop by the water, and he addresses the group.

“I would really like to raise my hands to all of you, to the hard work and willingness to work with us, to be with us, to be with this land,” he said.

The restoration project was funded by the B.C. government and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, implemented by Katzie First Nation, Resilient Waters, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Trust of British Columbia, with many helping hands involved.

For three years the partners worked together to reestablish waterflow in the marsh. The wetlands connection to the Pitt River and South Fraser River system was disconnected when early settlers installed a dike, which has since been removed. 

“I love doing the work. I love being on our territory and helping the environment,” Mackenzie Adams, another Katzie guardian, added. Adams monitored the site throughout the project, and collected water and bird surveys to compare data before and after restoration. 

According to the B.C. Wildlife Federation, wetland monitoring is just as important as the initial restoration during a project. “Monitoring, maintenance, and data collection help us evaluate the effectiveness of restoration techniques and improve the performance and function of future projects,” it reads on their website.

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is now letting nature take its course, and with the area being home to one of the country’s largest salmon runs and smallest sandhill crane populations, monitoring the wetland is critical work for Katzie Guardians. 

“I was there one of the first days … comparing the first day to the last day was pretty eye opening because you can already see the differences from the river water coming in. It will be an awesome habitat for all birds and salmon fry,” Adams said. 

While the exact impact is currently unknown, wetland restoration benefits are well documented. Leon’s team will be on top of that data, working with partners to restore and conserve native plants and animals in the area.

Relationships between Katzie Guardians and partners in the project have flourished. A local property owner who attended the celebration shared their initial concerns after seeing excavation equipment clearing a path to the dike, and their relief after learning more about the endeavour. Beyond its environmental impacts, the project has brought people together from all walks of life who want to see salmon and wildlife in and around the Fraser River thrive.

Restoration project had many partners, but Katzie had final say

Dan Straker, the manager for the Resilient Waters project, was a lead organizer under the direction of Katzie Guardians and leadership. 

“With Katzie First Nation, it was determined early on they would have final decision making and be informing the project along the way. All the partners fell in line with that idea and thinking,” Straker told the Narwhal. 

“What we ended up with was this really nice blended way of doing things, from a more two-eyed seeing approach.” 

Leon added that, throughout the endeavour, Katzie brought in their customs, culture and laws.

“It’s really important and special to us to know our place names in our territory. When we have our guardians come out, we’re honored to be on those place names such as Xwíʔləm̓nəc,” Leon said. 

It’s a sentiment shared by Katzie’s guardian coordinator April Pierre. In a quiet moment of emotion in the circle, she addressed a reality shared by many First Nations people: growing up away from her homelands.

The Xwíʔləm̓nəc restoration project gave Pierre an opportunity to spend time on land she had never been to — the land of her ancestors. It’s one emotional moment of many that were shared during the celebration, as others reflected on the marine and wildlife already making appearances in the marsh.

Dikes were built to create flat land for agriculture in the area since the late 1800s. Restoring the marsh’s connection to the river has immense ecological benefits and cultural benefits for local First Nations.

“Conservation organizations in previous decades had a different approach to conservation land management that I think sometimes excluded other organizations and nations,” Ducks Unlimited senior restoration biologist, Eric Balke, said.

“I think we are learning new and better ways of moving forward, more collaborative ways, and this project is a great example of that.”

Balke has been involved with restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc since brainstorming and planning days, eventually passing the reins to his colleague Alison Martin.

“What excites me about this project is it’s all about restoring relationships,” he said. “You’re restoring the relationship between the river and these wetlands that were formerly alienated by dikes. You’re restoring the relationship between Xwíʔləm̓nəc and juvenile salmon that previously were prevented from accessing the site … it’s also restoring the relationship between Katzie and their kin.”

Wetland restoration benefits salmon

In the Pacific Northwest, both people and the ecosystem know how important salmon is. Xwíʔləm̓nəc is connected to Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed, the Fraser River. 

According to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, “floodplains provide critical, food-rich habitat for juvenile salmon. These low-lying areas adjacent to stream channels allow young salmon to grow healthy and strong before their journey to the ocean.”

But dikes disrupt the river’s connection to the marsh, blocking valuable nutrients and harming the salmon and other species.

“Wetlands, such as tidal marshes, help to collect sediment that build up the marsh platform, helping to protect our communities from flooding,” Balke said.

“This land that settlers found is super valuable for farming and agriculture, it was valuable because of the sediment that was delivered, because of the nutrients that were delivered by the river,” he said.

“When we construct dikes we disconnect the river from its floodplain. The river can no longer deliver those critical ingredients.”

A huge benefit of restoring tidal marshes is that they are one of the most effective ways of capturing and storing carbon, contaminants and pollutants that flow downstream. 

Further, Xwíʔləm̓nəc is home to wapoto and tule, two traditional plants for Katzie First Nation that have been impacted from dikes. Restoring the wetland is giving members of the nation hope that these plants can be harvested for food and mat-making once again.

The marsh is also home to sandhill cranes, whose local population has hovered around 30 to 35 birds for decades, Myles Lamont told the Narwhal. He was brought into the project by Katzie as a sandhill crane consultant.

“The remaining birds seem to nest in golf courses and some very small regional parks … Unfortunately they’ve been getting struck by golf balls. Quite commonly over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve had to rescue a few birds that have had broken legs or injuries as a result of golf ball strikes, particularly in Richmond,” Lamont said. 

He is hopeful that restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc to a wetland will bring in enough water to create a nesting habitat for the birds, drawing them away from golf courses. As folks went around the sharing circle, Lamont spotted one overhead, calling out, “Crane!” 

“It’s really cool being a part of it. Just knowing that we’re making a difference, I’m making a difference,” Adams said.“The salmon habitat has a place to go throughout the winter and so do the sandhill cranes and birds. It’s a good feeling … I feel accomplished.”

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Summary

• A shuttered resort in Kananaskis Country could size up and reopen, with plans to build 1,400 parking spots, mountain coasters, minigolf and space for nearly 10,000 visitors a day.
• The location has been designated under Alberta’s All-season Resorts Act, which aims to speed up approvals for tourism projects.
• Experts are concerned the project, the size of a small city, will consume huge amounts of water in a region already dealing with drought.

Hidden amongst the sprawling, rugged network of public land, protected areas and provincial parks 125 kilometres west of Calgary, scattered, partially boarded up buildings sit below mountain peaks. They are the relics of the once-vibrant Fortress Mountain Resort. 

Now the company behind the on-again, off-again ski resort is applying under the All-season Resorts Act to build out its aged resort as a much-expanded four-season destination.

But when Fortress Mountain Resort unveiled its redevelopment plan in January, many were left with more questions than answers, particularly when it comes to the water supply for thousands of visitors to a drought-stricken region. 

“I don’t understand where that water’s going to come from,” Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, said in an interview with The Narwhal. 

The resort would welcome nearly 10,000 additional daily visitors to Kananaskis Country at its peak, which Sandford compared to the development of a small city. 

“A town the size that they’re developing, that water footprint’s really heavy,” he said. “What are the downstream effects going to be?”

The proposed expansion is a far cry from the old days of Fortress. When the resort first opened in 1967 under the name Snowridge, the lodge could accommodate 140 overnight guests. Six condos were built in 1976.

The ski hill operated for decades, changing hands multiple times before closing to the public one last time in 2006. 

Now, Alberta’s 2024 All-season Resorts Act is giving it new life. The Alberta government says the act helps to grow the tourism industry, “strengthen investor confidence” and offer “tailored support to the resort development industry.” The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society says the act means resorts can circumvent and undermine environmental laws. Under the act, areas are designated for streamlined approval for tourism projects.

Fortress is hoping to develop in one of three areas that were designated under the act in December. A fourth is under review. 

The five-phase vision for Fortress includes up to 9,650 day-visitors by completion and 1,500 employees, plus overnight visitors and staff in 2,500 on-site units that would be a mix of tourist accommodation, real estate and employee housing, along with at least 1,400 parking stalls. It would take 15 years to complete. 

Designating the Fortress site for an all-season resort required the removal of 131 hectares from provincial parkland, according to an analysis from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

The resort will include activities like electric all-terrain vehicles, mountain biking, minigolf, two “mountain coasters” (bobsled-like roller coasters), zip lining and more, along with infrastructure for more than 12 ski lifts, including five gondolas and five chairlifts. 

It’s what Katie Morrison, the executive director of the southern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, describes as an “amusement park” in an area of ecological importance for sensitive wildlife like grizzly bears, wolverines and bull trout — all in an area already under strain from tourism.

For its part, Fortress says the project team is dedicated to sustainability.

“We aim to be the most water-efficient resort in Alberta,” project director Danielle Vlemmiks said in response to The Narwhal’s questions over email.

Vlemmiks said, should the resort decide to make snow in later phases, Fortress plans to use grey water for snowmaking, something done at other resorts, and is planning activities that do not require large water use.

But that doesn’t quell concerns from environmental advocates who have long been ringing alarm bells over tourism development in the Rockies — an area where wildlife habitat and headwaters are already under threat from clear-cutting, coal mining and more.

So, when Fortress released its plan in January, it was a “worst-case scenario,” Morrison said.

Resort act a ‘regulatory failure’: lawyer

The Fortress proposal and water use is a good example of the All-season Resorts Act’s shortcomings, University of Calgary law professor Shaun Fluker said in an interview with The Narwhal.

Under the act, decision-making power for some large-scale recreation projects has been given to the Tourism Ministry, which has set a goal to grow tourism revenues to $25 billion by 2035. It’s a system Fluker describes as a “fiefdom of the minister.”  

“There are no guardrails,” he said.

The All-season Resorts Act establishes a new kind of zone, an “all-season resort area,” which can be created by the tourism minister. After an area has been designated under the act, a developer can then submit an application for a proposed development, including an environmental assessment it has contracted. The proposal must also undergo a minimum 30-day public consultation and an Indigenous consultation period. The Tourism Ministry makes a decision within 150 days of the application being complete. 

Morrison said the entire legislative process, from tabling the act to implementing it, has been rushed. And she noted the decision-making power lies with the same ministry mandated to increase tourism development, which she says is problematic, particularly under a fast timeline. 

“It’s a little bit of the fox watching the hen house,” Morrison said. “Some of the reasons we have had delays in approval on these things is because this is a really complex landscape.”

As it stands, Morrison said, the environmental assessment Fortress supplied as part of its application lacks critical information, and is “woefully inadequate” in addressing the potential impacts of the development. Bull trout, a threatened species in Alberta, have specifically been “completely ignored” by the report, she said, as has information needed to understand the impacts of the development on wildlife, aquatic ecosystems and water use in the region.

Fluker said the inadequacy of the assessment, which every expert in this story agreed lacked information for decision-making, “undermines the whole approval process.” 

“No credible impact assessment process would take that as a final submission because there’s really nothing usable in it,” he said. 

As a requirement, an assessment should put forth enough data for experts to evaluate the potential impacts of a project and come up with solutions. 

With this assessment, he said, “I don’t know how anybody could do that.” 

Details like how much water the resort would need to operate are currently being studied, Vlemmiks said. But, because Fortress is planning to be as economical with its water use as possible, the needs of the development will have to align with the project design, which will not be finalized for some time.

According to the assessment, and confirmed by Vlemmiks, Fortress has enough water for phase one of its five-phase plan, which anticipates 3,000 day-use visitors. Beyond that, more water may be required. 

According to a briefing note from the Tourism Ministry dated June 19, 2025, and obtained through a freedom of information request, the government is well aware of concerns with how the act will deal with water issues in particular. 

“[The Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas] has previously raised concerns about how [all-season resorts] will align with water management priorities, especially in light of recent droughts in southern Alberta,” the note reads. 

But, it adds, “these concerns are addressed” through a system where Tourism and Sport will share water management responsibilities at resorts alongside the Environment Ministry. 

The system is a red flag to Fluker.

Concerns should be brought to and evaluated by an independent board of scientific experts, he said. (The Alberta government did not respond to detailed questions from The Narwhal.)

“That is exactly the kind of issue or topic that a credible impact assessment process grapples [with],” he said. 

Morrison agrees, adding she was surprised water didn’t play a bigger role in the proposal — especially given Fortress’s history with water use.

Water from resort is currently sold as bottled ‘glacier water’

Alberta is in a multi-year drought, with conditions across the province ranging from “abnormally dry” to “severe drought.” Forty water shortage advisories were posted in April 2026. But southern Alberta has a long, complex history with drought and water management, including in Kananskis Country.

Alberta has seen two or three seasons of significant water shortage in the last 20 years, Cathy Ryan, a University of Calgary professor in earth, energy and environment, said. 

In times of drought, the main concerns are increased wildfires and sufficient water supply — for residents, visitors and ecosystems, Ryan said.

Water supply is managed by the province through a licence system that grants users the right to divert water whether from below ground or from rivers, lakes or streams.

Fortress is part of the vast Bow River Basin — which is itself within the South Saskatchewan River Basin drainage area. The Bow River flows through Banff National Park and eventually merges with the Oldman River to form the South Saskatchewan River. From there, it moves across the Prairies toward Medicine Hat in southern Alberta and beyond. 

The sale of new water licences in the South Saskatchewan River Basin, where Fortress is located, has been prohibited since 2006. But Fortress Mountain Holdings has two licences, one of which is for potable water. 

In 2019, Fortress was given the green light to sell half of the 98,700 cubic metres, or just under 40 Olympic swimming pools, of its potable water licence commercially. The change was opposed by environmental groups and lawyers and was challenged — unsuccessfully — by Stoney Nakoda First Nation in court in 2020. Canned water from Fortress is now sold as rök Glacier Water.

Should the resort proposal be approved, Vlemmiks said Fortress will cease commercial water sales.

She said the company plans to create a closed-loop system on site. That could include geothermal heat, greywater-supplied snowmaking and reusing water, though she did not provide any further details.

Vlemmiks also said Fortress is exploring a partnership with Stoney Nakoda First Nation to supply and manage water for subsequent phases, and is currently undergoing an Indigenous consultation process. Stoney Nakoda First Nation did not respond to a request for comment.  

“We are actively pursuing answers,” Vlemmiks said. 

But critics warn even the best-laid plans are subject to a changing climate — and declining water resources.

 Concerns about water shortages in Kananaskis Country

When it comes to divvying up water, Cathy Ryan from the University of Calgary said it’s been managed so far by “playing nicely in the sandbox.” But in the event of a shortage, the government can step in to manage water supply.

It’s happened more than once in the last 20 years. Most recently, in April 2024, Alberta instituted water-sharing agreements, where 38 of the largest water-licence holders — making up 90 per cent of the Bow and Oldman basins and 70 per cent in the Red Deer basin — agreed to voluntarily reduce water use if severe drought conditions developed due to several dry seasons and an El Niño winter.  

But water-sharing agreements are voluntary. 

In 2006, more drastic measures were taken: the province stopped the sale of new water licences in the over-allocated South Saskatchewan River Basin to protect the aquatic ecosystem and ensure Alberta could meet its water-sharing obligation with neighbouring provinces.

According to the province’s online tool, the Bow River Basin, where Fortress is located, was considered in moderate drought in February. 

In January, United Nations and Global Affairs Canada released a report about water bankruptcy, defined as when sustained water withdrawal exceeds replenishment, akin to spending outpacing income. Sandford, with the United Nations water think-tank, warned southern Alberta is already headed toward water bankruptcy. 

As climate change increases temperatures and exacerbates the effects of drought, Sandford’s concerns are far-reaching.

Fortress’s proposed development will land amidst a sea of warning signs outlined in the report, Sandford said. Southern Alberta ticks every box, he added, including infrastructure, long-term over-allocation of water and what’s known as ecological liquidation, when wetlands and forests are degraded for short-term gain.

Sandford said the province needs to plan for the persistent high temperatures, extreme drought and low snowpacks it is already seeing, and the impacts. Multiple wildfires have already been reported in southern Alberta since the beginning of the year. 

And as soil moisture dries up, rain won’t have the same penetrating effects, resulting in a “vicious circle of drying out,” Sandford said.

“You’re taking away the environment’s share of water,” he said. “Even at this moment, without the projected changes that we’re seeing, I don’t think they can do this.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

As a study in troubled operation, the Palisades Nuclear Plant once was ranked by the United States federal government as one of the four worst-performing nuclear power stations in the country. The 51-year-old facility closed in 2022, joining Big Rock Point near Charlevoix and 11 other nuclear plants decommissioned outside Michigan in what appeared to represent the sunset of the era of splitting atoms to produce electricity.

Not so fast. Sometime in the next few months, a New Jersey-based company called Holtec International is expected to finish renovating Palisades, fire up the old reactor and add 800 megawatts of generating capacity to Michigan’s electricity supply. It would be the first time a decommissioned nuclear plant has ever restarted in the United States. 

And that’s not the only game-changing nuclear development occurring at the Palisades site along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the state’s southwest corner. Holtec is busy seeking permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the United States’ licensing and safety agency, to start construction for a new 680-megawatt nuclear generating station next door to the old reactor. The company wants to power the new plant with not one but two 340-megawatt advanced small modular reactors.

So-called “SMRs” are now viewed by the industry, government, utilities and big energy consumers as one of the go-to electrical generating technologies of the 21st century. Holtec’s planned Pioneer I and II small reactors, and its Palisades reactor restart, signal the opening of a new era of electrical supply and demand in the Great Lakes basin. 

Holtec’s commitment to nuclear power, like other developers in the U.S. nuclear sector, is motivated by several converging and unconfirmed projections that are prompting billions of dollars in investment. By far the most important are that the cost of building nuclear plants will fall, and that demand for electricity will significantly increase. Nuclear developers and utility executives have embraced both optimistic scenarios, especially that electrical demand could increase as much as 50 per cent by mid-century, driven by data centre construction, new manufacturing plants, growing cities and electrified transportation. Both of Holtec’s projects in Michigan, and several more developments by other companies in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Ontario, are giving nuclear power new purchase in the region’s energy landscape.

One of the most influential supporters is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is positioning Michigan at the lead of the nuclear revival era. She declared in a statement that opening Palisades and adding the small modular reactor plant “will lower energy costs, reaffirm Michigan’s clean energy leadership and show the world that we are the best place to do business.” 

Whitmer signed legislation in 2023 mandating that 100 per cent of the state’s electricity come from “clean power” sources, among them nuclear energy. Michigan awarded Holtec US$300 million to restart Palisades, a portion of the public funding package that included US$1.52 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Energy Department also awarded Holtec US$400 million more to develop the new SMR plant.

A study of small modular reactor development by the Department of Energy in 2023 found that construction costs for the first plants, like the one Holtec is planning, will be high because of limits on the supply chain providing parts, construction experience and unknown interest rates for financing. At current estimates of SMR construction costs of US$12 million to $15 million per megawatt, Holtec’s 680-megawatt plant could be put into operation at a cost of US$7 billion to $10 billion.

Michigan’s bid to stimulate new markets for nuclear energy, moreover, are still dogged by old concerns about safety, waste management and the cost of construction and operation. Three public interest groups filed a federal lawsuit in November asserting that opening the old Palisades reactor was illegal and unsafe. The case is pending in Federal District Court in Grand Rapids.

Safety, cost and waste addressed

By any measure, managing high-level radioactive waste from commercial reactors has not changed much in the last half century and persists as an issue because no permanent waste repository has been established in the U.S. But other considerations of the risks, benefits and cost of nuclear power are tilting in new directions, especially for SMR plants like the one Holtec is proposing in Michigan. 

Small modular reactor developers make a consistent case for proceeding with the new technology.

Water consumption looks to be an environmental advantage, particularly in water-abundant regions like the Great Lakes. Holtec’s environmental statement filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that the two reactors will draw 95,000 litres a minute for operation — as much as 135 million litres a day. At that rate the new plant, which is 15 per cent smaller than the existing Palisades plant, will withdraw 75 per cent less water. 

Because of its more compact 50-hectare footprint, the new Holtec plant would easily fit onto the 175-hectare site that already encompasses the existing reactor. It will transmit electricity with the existing powerlines and infrastructure. And like other commercial reactors, small modular reactors don’t discharge climate-warming gases, a big factor in why nuclear power has gained considerably more support in public polling in recent years.

When it comes to operational safety, Holtec and other SMR plant developers say their designs also answer that concern. The advanced modular reactors are smaller and contain less fuel, produce lower levels of radiation and can operate at a lower temperature and pressure than big conventional reactors. Those properties enable engineers to design a reactor that can be cooled with water or air, and can be shut down with gravity-fed systems that don’t rely on mechanical pumps. 

“When it comes to safety the question is, ‘How do I keep this cool?’ ” Brendan Kochunas, associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, said. “And that comes back to the amount of fuel that you have in the core. SMRs have smaller cores. There’s less heat being produced so you need to remove less heat.”

Industry executives assert that because the reactors are smaller than conventional 1,000-megawatt plants, they will require fewer construction materials, take fewer years to build and be less expensive to operate. Industry executives say their goal is to standardize designs so that parts can be manufactured and new reactors can be assembled and shipped on trucks or by rail. And because SMR plants have multiple reactors, one can be shut down for maintenance while the others continue operating. 

“In discussions we’ve had about small modular reactors, there may be lower upfront costs and potentially faster deployment because you don’t have quite as much concrete,” Scott Burnell, the spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an interview. “And once you get into operation, the concept is you’ve got several small reactors running. If you bring one down for maintenance, you still have others running, generating profit.”

Race for orders

Holtec is competing with 30 other small modular reactor developers in the U.S. to be among the first to bring its reactor to market. Patrick O’Brien, the Holtec spokesperson, explained that the company has spent 15 years designing the SMR-300, preparing architectural plans for the generating station and keeping the regulatory commission informed of its activities. Though the SMR-300 has not received an operating licence, O’Brien said Holtec is confident it will be approved and the plant would be operating in 2032. “A lot of the work was done up front,” he said. “We’re anticipating two and a half more years’ worth of licensing work from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission]. And two and a half years of construction.”

That’s an optimistic schedule for new nuclear plants. NuScale, an SMR designer based in Oregon, licensed its first 66-megawatt reactor with the regulatory commission in 2023. It has yet to build a new plant. NuScale’s first project to install seven small modular reactors at a 462-megawatt plant in Idaho collapsed after construction cost estimates increased from under US$4 billion to more than $9 billion. 

The NuScale experience reveals that uncontrolled costs are a primary impediment not just for big traditional reactors but also to SMR development. Small modular reactors don’t exist in North America or Europe, and just three operate in the world — two 35-megawatt reactors operating on a ship in Russia and a third 125-megawatt small modular reactor in China. “One always has to remember that these are experimental technologies,” Joseph Romm, a physicist and senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Both the Russian and Chinese reactors had huge cost overruns.”

According to an important study published last year by the University of Michigan, small modular reactors also may produce new environmental risks that could attract more review. Small reactors, for instance, have the potential to introduce new and unregulated byproducts and increased levels of radioactivity due to the demand for highly enriched uranium fuel, according to the report, The Reactor Around The Corner.

Another likely environmental risk is deploying small reactors to power big industrial projects in the world’s wild and undeveloped places. Small modular reactors pack a lot of energy into a small and portable power source, said the report’s authors, who projected that the small reactors will enable construction of big mines and industrial plants in terrain that has been too expensive to reach or entirely inaccessible. “SMRs will introduce and exacerbate direct and indirect environmental harms, especially on marginalized communities, that complicate the justification for using them to mitigate climate change,” they wrote.

Midwest familiarity with atomic technology

To date, elected leaders and residents in Michigan and the other Great Lakes states have responded to the opening of a new era of nuclear development with much more enthusiasm than alarm. That may be due principally to the region’s pioneering role in fostering atomic energy. The first nuclear chain reaction occurred at the University of Chicago in 1942. Argonne National Laboratory opened in Illinois in 1946 to serve as the centre of atomic research and technology development. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania opened in 1957 as the first commercial nuclear generating station.

Not since the height of commercial nuclear energy construction in the 1960s and 1970s have Great Lakes states seen such a concentration of new nuclear projects either underway or planned. The Palisades restart would push the number of operating nuclear reactors in the eight states to 24, second only to the more than 30 big reactors operating in the six southeast states.

More big reactors could be on the way. DTE Energy notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year that it is actively studying the development of a new reactor at its Fermi Nuclear Generating Station south of Detroit along Lake Erie. 

Small modular reactor plants, too, are attracting attention in the Great Lakes basin. Ontario Power Generation is constructing a 1,200-megawatt plant, composed of four 300-megawatt SMRs, at its Darlington Nuclear Generating Station along the shore of Lake Ontario. It could be the first operating commercial SMR plant in North America. 

Utah-based EnergySolutions is proposing to build “new nuclear generation” along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Wisconsin at the Kewaunee Power Station, which closed operation in 2013. Oklo Inc., a California company, is proposing a small modular reactor in Portsmouth, Ohio, where a closed federal plant once enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The University of Illinois notified the regulatory commission that it is developing a gas-cooled SMR research reactor at its campus in Champaign-Urbana. 

The surge of interest is the second time this century that utilities, government and investors have tried to revive nuclear power in the U.S., and is driven by many of the same factors. One is federal policy to promote nuclear projects. The second is a tide of government financing that can be traced back to 2021 when then-president Joe Biden signed the US$1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that directed US$8 billion to nuclear energy. Three years later, Biden signed the ADVANCE Act to make it easier and less expensive for nuclear plant developers to license their designs with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

President Donald Trump also supports nuclear energy. He signed four executive orders in 2025 to accelerate the deployment and integration of advanced nuclear reactor technologies, and directed federal agencies to take aggressive action to build a nuclear production industry to mine and enrich uranium and construct manufacturing plants to fabricate fuel, reactors and parts. Earlier this month, the Department of Energy exempted small modular reactors from National Environmental Policy Act review. 

Westinghouse late last year signed an agreement with the U.S. government to build ten 1,000-megawatt reactors in the U.S. That agreement is tied to the pact that Trump reached with Japan last October to finance US$332 billion “to support critical energy infrastructure in the United States,” including the construction of ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors and small modular reactors. The president also wants to develop the capacity to recycle nuclear fuel to reduce highly radioactive waste. 

Trump’s goal is to quadruple electrical generation capacity from nuclear power from 97 gigawatts today, powered by 94 operating reactors, to 400 gigawatts by 2050.

In the last five years, Congress has enacted more than US$20 billion in direct appropriations for nuclear energy programs, along with tax credits and federal loan authority that add billions more in federal support for existing and advanced reactors. 

U.S. technology giants like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft also are getting involved.

Company executives are establishing formal agreements with nuclear developers to build and buy power for their data centres. Meta, for instance, has an agreement with Oklo Inc. to build a proposed 1,200-megawatt small modular reactor plant in Ohio. The high-tech stalwarts also joined 14 major global banks and financial institutions, 140 nuclear industry companies and 31 countries in signing a pledge last year in Texas to support tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050.

Just marketing?

The big unknown is how much of this fervour is grounded in reality, and how much is hype and marketing. During the last attempt to revive nuclear energy in the U.S., from 2007 to 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission counted over 20 nuclear plant proposals to review. But the heat of atomic hope quickly cooled as fracking started to produce ample supplies of natural gas, and much less expensive wind and solar power was gaining momentum. Just two new reactors that started construction during that period actually got built and began operating at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle. It took the utility 15 years to finish the project in 2024 at a cost of more than US$30 billion. 

“Some vendors are overselling the vision,” Kochunas of the University of Michigan said. “I hope we do see some SMRs. They still have challenges in their economics. For it to succeed, one of these companies is going to need to establish a pretty substantial order book.” 

Could that be Holtec? 

“Yes,” Kochunas said. “I think they’ll get that built in Michigan. If they execute the project successfully, they will have opportunities to build more of them. Hopefully, you’ll see people lining up to get them. But if the execution of the project goes poorly and there’s significant delays and cost overruns and problems, it’s going to be hard to change that first impression.”

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Researchers at the University of Manitoba will soon have a new, non-invasive tool to study the province’s vast groundwater resources after inking a partnership with Alberta-based mining company Sio Silica.

“If the technology works … it’s going to provide a mechanism to do real-time monitoring of changes in groundwater,” Ricardo Mantilla, an associate professor in the university’s civil engineering department and lead researcher for the project, said in an interview. 

The emerging technology — called absolute quantum gravimetry — can measure changes in gravity caused by changes in groundwater levels, allowing researchers to better understand the flow and storage of underground water resources without the need for “expensive and disruptive” drilling, he said.

“That obviously has applications for [Sio Silica], but it can have very important implications for how we understand groundwater in aquifers in our province.”

Sio Silica president Carla Devlin said the partnership demonstrates the company’s support for “independent research and transparent monitoring … [that] strengthens accountability and builds trust” as it continues to seek a licence for a controversial sand mine.

Sio Silica is in the process of seeking an environmental licence for a mine that proposes airlifting silica sand from a drinking water aquifer in southeastern Manitoba. It’s the company’s second attempt to secure a licence; Manitoba’s environment minister rejected an initial proposal in early 2024 following a hearing by the province’s Clean Environment Commission.

The company believes the aquifer, located 60 metres below the communities of Vivian, Anola, Springfield and others, contains high-purity silica sand that can be transformed into silicon metal — a critical mineral used for high-tech applications such as computer chips and lithium-ion batteries. Silica sand is also used in manufacturing, solar panel production and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Residents have pushed back against the mining operation, concerned it could damage a drinking water source that serves more than 120,000 households.

The environment commission described the company’s initial proposal to drill more than 7,000 wells over 25 years and extract more than one million tonnes of sand annually with a technique that has never been used for a large-scale mine as “experimental,” urging caution and additional testing.

In October, Sio Silica submitted a revised application to the environmental assessment branch that proposes fewer wells, smaller sand quantities and a more gradual approach.

Devlin said supporting groundwater monitoring research at Manitoba’s largest university shows the company is “really focused on water safety.”

“The work is designed to safeguard groundwater, and it will confirm that our operations will not put Manitoba’s water at risk. By monitoring and sharing data, we are helping ensure clean, safe water for communities now and into the future,” she added. 

While the technology to monitor changes in the gravitational field caused by water movement is already used in satellites, Mantilla said this new machinery — effectively a “very sophisticated refrigerator” that cools atoms to a temperature where changes in gravity become measurable — can be loaded into a truck and carted around the province, allowing for a much more localized understanding of water systems.

Mantilla said the company’s mine site could become “a good experimental test” of the new technology, but his team has a much broader focus. 

“Groundwater is everything in Manitoba,” he said.

The province, famed for its 100,000 lakes, its web of rivers and its connection to the Arctic, is a “perfect laboratory” for water research, Mantilla said, adding the research will also have implications for one of the province’s largest industries — agriculture.

“A lot of people in the province rely on groundwater, and we want to make sure that resource is being used in a sustainable way,” Mantilla said. “This technology is well beyond any particular industrial application.” 

Mantilla said his team has been researching this method of groundwater monitoring for over a year, and was seeking out funders to help purchase the specialized machinery, which “runs in the million-dollar type of investment.” 

He connected with Sio Silica when the company visited several research groups in the university’s engineering department and took an interest in his project, later agreeing to sponsor the research.

Hans-Joachim Wieden, the university’s associate vice-president for partnership, knowledge mobilization and innovation, said these kinds of industry partnerships are critical to maximize the impact of the institution’s research. Support from the private sector helps fill gaps in federal research funding, gives students valuable job experience and provides a pathway for research to make a tangible impact in communities.

“We, as the university, are interested in doing industry collaboration … for the benefits it holds for the students, for the researchers and for the communities we are in,” Wieden said.

On top of its financial contribution, Sio Silica plans to share groundwater monitoring data from its mine site with the university to help model and understand the aquifer as a complete system. Devlin noted the company envisions a long-term partnership that could include helping build out the university’s hydrology department.

“The work is not a localized mitigation exercise, it’s a foundational reset in how aquifers are understood,” she said of Mantilla’s research.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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Splashed across the website of nearly every conservation authority in Ontario is a warning about low water levels. 

For nearly 80 years, the provincial agencies have been tasked with protecting public health and safety related to the province’s watersheds. That means safeguarding local drinking water sources and working to reduce the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. As Ontario’s population has grown, they have also been responsible for regulating development to minimize those risks, issuing permits only to those who pay attention to sustainable construction and growth.

Over the last six years, the Doug Ford government has passed four bills that have drastically changed the rules governing the 36 conservation authorities’ ability to do this job — all to speed up development. Those changes have included reducing conservation authorities’ influence over development, weakening their ability to protect water quality and wetlands and having their decisions be overruled by the overseeing minister.

Each change has come with an argument of efficiency, and since then, nearly all conservation authorities have publicly reported permits are being reviewed faster. Still, some 19 months after the last set of changes was imposed, the government has delivered yet another watershed change: it is proposing to consolidate 36 agencies into seven.

On Oct. 31, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said individual conservation authorities were “operating largely on their own, with fragmented and outdated data systems and a patchwork of standards and service delivery.” This, he said, had led to “unpredictable and inconsistent turnaround times” for development permit approvals. 

“This is holding back Ontario,” he said.

“Obviously, there’s a fair bit of whiplash or scar tissue, pick your metaphor,” one conservation authority official from northern Ontario said. The Narwhal spoke with 12 people at 12 authorities for this story, many of whom asked to keep their names confidential for fear of retribution from the government. 

According to most of the sources, the threat to consolidate conservation authorities has been “the worst-kept secret” for a long time. It’s been talked about since this government took office, especially as Ford has previously moved to consolidate health care, and is rumoured to be planning the same for school boards. The consistent emphasis on efficiency and rapid development has kept conservation authorities in the crosshairs, as they strived to meet the government pressures without losing focus on their mandate to preserve Ontario’s watersheds and protect the public.

Currently, 26 out of 36 conservation authorities have staff closely monitoring worryingly low water levels in rivers and lakes across the province, with some declaring near-drought conditions brought on by a lack of rain. They’re doing this while they also grapple with the impacts of consolidation.

Consolidation of conservation authorities would be ‘a drastic shift’ that may ‘slow approvals, create confusion’

Despite assurances from McCarthy that they will all still be able to do this core job, there is deep skepticism among conservation authorities based on a historically fraught relationship and a litany of recent Progressive Conservative policies that have endangered Ontario’s water, forests and land. In 2023, two watchdog reports on the Greenbelt scandal found the Ford government had prioritized developer requests over environmental and technical considerations.

“The government is right to want a conservation authority system that is more consistent, transparent and efficient, especially when it comes to supporting housing and economic growth,” Jonathan Scott, a councillor for the town of Bradford West Gwillimbury and chair of the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority board, told The Narwhal. “There may be room for targeted, sensible consolidation in Ontario’s conservation system, but moving from 36 authorities to just seven would be a drastic shift.” 

Scott said the local environmental expertise in each individual authority is essential. “A merger of that scale could create a larger, more distant bureaucracy that is less responsive to local municipalities, developers and farmers — exactly the people who need timely service and value having a local municipal official or trusted member of staff they can call directly,” he said.

“Losing that connection could slow approvals, create confusion and ultimately have the opposite effect of what the government intends.”

The government’s proposal to consolidate conservation authorities has been posted on the Environmental Registry of Ontario for public feedback until Dec. 22. It includes three parts: create a central agency to manage conservation authorities, consult on the boundaries and governance structures of the newly proposed seven regional agencies and then create said agencies by spring 2026. Each proposal has sparked several concerns for conservation authority staff who are in the process of consulting with their municipalities and partners. 

As has been the case since June 2024, no one from the Ontario Ministry of Environment responded to questions from The Narwhal.

Consolidating conservation authorities means overseeing much larger and more complicated watersheds

Ford has been consistently touting the need for “made-in-Ontario” solutions to the province’s issues: conservation authorities are an example of just that. They were created by a Progressive Conservative government in 1946 in response to deforestation. They were strengthened to prevent repeats of the extreme flooding caused by Hurricane Hazel in 1954. While they were tasked with acquiring land for conservation and recreation, their main job has always been monitoring waterways for potential deadly floods, including by regulating development near waterways and wetlands, in flood plains and on Great Lakes shorelines. 

Today, all but five of the 36 conservation authorities are in heavily developed southern Ontario. 

Each authority was created to manage its own watershed, an area of land that drains all the streams and rainfall into a lake, bay or river. The government’s proposal to create seven conservation authorities is based only on the Great Lakes watersheds: Lake Erie, Lake Huron-Superior, Lake Ontario, divided into western, central and eastern and the St. Lawrence River. 

“It’s not a reduction; it’s a consolidation and an amalgamation, which means that all of the communities currently served by conservation authorities will continue to be served by conservation authorities,” Minister McCarthy said on Oct. 31. He repeatedly promised there will be no layoffs in this new structure, but managers will be redeployed as frontline staff.

Conservation authorities have consolidated before. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority was once four authorities, merged in 1957 to better manage a larger floodplain. Conservation Sudbury and Conservation Halton are both the result of similar mergers. 

Almost all of these consolidations were local decisions made by municipal governments based on specific watershed or development concerns. Earlier this year, municipalities dismissed the idea of merging the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority with Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, saying it would create more costs and less localized service. 

“Geography has always dictated policy,” an eastern Ontario official said. “I’m not sure that’s what’s happening now.”

Every authority oversees a different kind of environment, even if they seem nearby on a map. Water moves differently through varying landscapes and development rates, and the potential effects of flooding on the environment also vary based on geography.

Take the proposed Huron-Superior conservation authority. It would bring together seven authorities spanning roughly 1,400 kilometres and 78 municipalities from Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior through Bruce, Grey and Dufferin Counties, Simcoe County, York Region, Kawartha Lakes and Durham Region. The natural systems that feed Lake Huron, Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay differ significantly from those along the north shore of Lake Superior. Each has distinct geology, land use and flood-risk patterns.

“It’s no joke to say that large of a region is roughly the size of Switzerland, with very different conditions and needs,” Scott said. “The costs of integrating governance, technology and operations across such a vast area could easily outweigh any savings, while adding complexity and distance.”

Carl Jorgensen, general manager of Conservation Sudbury, said that in northern Ontario, conservation authorities are far from each other. That makes sharing resources extremely challenging.

“The work we do is very localized,” he said. “The government has provided so little so far on how this is actually going to be implemented; it’s really hard to figure out how these new regional conservation authorities will work.”

“But assuming local offices remain, with staff who can support and perform that frontline work efficiently, there’s no advantage to reducing 36 to seven.”

McCarthy insists that not much will change. “Conservation authorities will continue to deliver the programs and the services that they deliver today,” he said on Oct. 31. 

“Their mandate is not changing. The areas served by conservation authorities are not changing. Their funding is not changing. In fact, they will be better equipped than ever before to meet the changing needs of our communities.”

Conservation authority consolidation threatens their ‘localized approach, localized expertise’

Conservation authorities are governed by provincial law but they are created, funded and managed by municipal governments. Local elected municipal officials sit on the boards to oversee their work and budgets, the majority of which is paid by municipal taxes. Sometimes, municipalities send money to more than one authority because watershed boundaries differ from city or town limits.

“We’re not created equal,” one official from central Ontario told The Narwhal. Larger authorities have more money and more staff. “The system can be kind of dysfunctional and needs a shakeup, but the right kind of shakeup that gives all of us the resources we need to do the important work we do.”

Angela Coleman, executive director of Conservation Ontario, told The Narwhal she’s concerned that consolidation could alter longstanding relationships, something she hopes the advocacy organization can share during the consultation process. 

“One of the main drivers that we’re hearing is that municipalities provide funding through their levies, and because of that, representation and decision-making on conservation authority boards must be carefully structured to reflect those financial contributions,” she said.

There is little in the government’s proposal about what the governing boards of amalgamated conservation authorities would look like. But those doing math in their heads are worried about the creation of extremely large boards made up of twice the number of municipal officials currently appointed. Karen Nesbitt, policy director for the Association of Municipalities Ontario, told The Narwhal this would effectively “weaken local municipal leaders’ voice, leading to a major loss of local control over conservation and environmental protection in communities.” 

In an email to The Narwhal, Nesbitt said there is general support for streamlining and improving services. “However, we are seriously concerned about how this is being carried out,” she said. “The government is making major changes, but it is not providing any new, ongoing provincial funding to run conservation authorities effectively. Worse, this funding gap is being made harder to manage because the province is taking these steps simultaneously.”

Staff also worry about a reduced level of on-the-ground services. “We are the last vestiges of the Ontario Ministry of Environment,” an official from western Ontario said. “We’re the only ones still on the ground, accountable to our communities and serving them with science-based work. After consolidation, I don’t know how we can keep doing that.”

A new provincial agency will centralize decision-making and oversight over conservation authorities

The consolidation will come via the Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, a new government organization that will “provide centralized leadership, efficient governance, strategic direction and oversight of Ontario’s conservation authorities.”

That includes helping to “streamline and standardize service delivery” and ensure the “consistent application of provincial standards” for flood risk assessment and management. The agency will also help update floodplain mapping and dam infrastructure and develop a “single, digital permitting platform.” 

But while the goals of the agency make sense on paper, conservation authority staff are questioning why consolidation is needed in addition to that. Many already collaborate extensively through shared programs, technical partnerships and joint projects, especially in remote and rural Ontario, where resources are limited. 

“If it were only about efficiency, mandate what hardware and software we should use, give us the money for it, impose certain standards on this and be done with it,” an eastern Ontario authority official said. “But this goes so much further than that. It’s not about efficiency; it’s about removing power from the communities and imposing control from above.” 

“There is no equivalent model in Ontario where people are being told they have to pay for a provincial agency to oversee them,” the official continued. “It’s bizarre … good technology can’t make up for bad governance.” 

Scott agreed. “If governance becomes more centralized under a provincial agency while local boards lose control, we could end up with a system where municipal dollars are being spent under provincial direction without municipal oversight,” he said. “That would be a fundamental change to how Ontario’s watershed management system has operated for nearly eighty years — and not, in my view, a change for the better.”

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The Doug Ford government wants to give itself the power to dictate more of the rules around how Ontario protects its drinking water.

The Ministry of Red Tape Reduction said the process in place to change the rules around drinking water is “overly complex and slow.” It said reforming that process will support housing construction and development, while keeping water safeguards in place.

But one expert said the move will take away power from local committees tasked with protecting their region’s water supply, centralizing it in the hands of the government.

If the government wants to beef up some local water protections, some tweaks to the process could be useful, according to Theresa McClenaghan, executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. But without more details from the government clarifying how it will use its new powers, she added, it could also open the door to weaker public health protections down the road.

That’s a particularly ominous thought for some, coming 25 years after the Walkerton tragedy, which killed seven people and caused 2,300 more to become seriously ill, when the water supply in the town on the east side of Lake Huron became contaminated with E. coli from cattle manure.

Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner said the changes amount to “reducing the power of independent, evidence-based experts and transferring that authority to the minister.”

“It certainly weakens the protections that were put in place out of the lessons learned from Walkerton,” he said in an interview. That includes the need for overlapping layers of protection.

“In the same way that we have a lot of redundancies around air traffic control … if something goes wrong here, you want to make sure there are other checks and balances. Because once you contaminate drinking water, you put people’s lives at risk.”

Red Tape Reduction Minister Andrea Khanjin’s office did not respond to questions from The Narwhal before publication.

Green Party: Walkerton showed the need for multiple levels of Ontario drinking water protection

On Oct. 20, Premier Ford’s Progressive Conservative government introduced Bill 56, the Building a More Competitive Economy Act. Among other things, the bill would change the Clean Water Act, a law put in place following a two-year inquiry into the disaster in Walkerton.

The Walkerton inquiry found the incident could have been prevented if a local official had properly monitored drinking water treatments — and if the Progressive Conservative government of the time, under Mike Harris, had not cut funding to the provincial Environment Ministry.

One solution that came out of the inquiry was to establish a series of regional plans to protect Ontario’s sources of drinking water.

The plans are locally developed and overseen by conservationists, public representatives and others. They identify groundwater and surface water flows around local drinking water supplies, the risks posed by things like industrial pollution or agricultural runoff and what rules should be in place to mitigate those risks.

There are now 19 committees overseeing 38 of these water protection plans across the province. The area each plan oversees is based largely on the conservation authorities in Ontario, along with two others that apply to areas of Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula, and are tailored to the geology and hydrology of each area.

McClenaghan, of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, said the point of this decentralized system is to make sure that each region has practical rules that make sense for them, including for local businesses.

The Building a More Competitive Economy Act would change the law so the government can dictate more of the specific wording around drinking water rules in the protection plans, instead of leaving that to the committees, she said.

For example, the province could mandate standardized wording to ban animal manure from certain zones around water wells, the cause of the Walkerton tragedy, instead of letting the local committee describe that as it chooses, she said.

“Basically, from what I can see, it’s just substituting the current system with a more prescriptive approach,” she said.

“It will remove some flexibility and approach from the committees — and I’ll be quite keen to find out from committees if they think some of their current approaches wouldn’t be permitted.”

The province might also step in to block a water protection committee’s specific approach to dealing with a threat to its local water supply, McClenaghan said. But she added Ontarians won’t know specific details until the government clarifies its role. That won’t happen until the Building a More Competitive Economy Act, which is being debated in the legislature, is passed.

Schreiner said one of the lessons from Walkerton was the need to have a “multi-barrier approach” and the committees were set up “to take the politics out of it.”

Having a multi-step system in place to ensure companies can’t carry out activities with a high risk of contamination, he said, may have prevented the extent of the mercury poisoning that happened in Grassy Narrows First Nation, where drinking water has been contaminated for decades.

In a press release, the government said it wants to change the clean water law because current requirements like consultation periods and ministerial approval can take years for even “routine” projects with pre-defined protections, like replacing an existing well.

It said it would be “simplifying consultation” and “expanding what counts as a minor change” to the water protection plans. This would support “housing and infrastructure development,” the government claimed, while keeping “strong protections for source water in place” as well as “timely, effective safeguards for municipal drinking water sources.”

The changes are “streamlining” so that “unnecessary repetition” is avoided, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy told reporters the day the bill was introduced.

Ford plans to change both Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act

The government also said there would be upcoming changes to the Safe Drinking Water Act — a separate law that makes sure tap water can be consumed and establishes rules around water treatment — that would let new wells or intakes start supplying water while the protection plans were still being updated.

The Building a More Competitive Economy Act is not the first time the Ford government has enacted laws that may jeopardize the province’s drinking water protections, according to McClenaghan’s organization.

In a blog post from April, the Canadian Environmental Law Association said the two-year-old Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, that allowed municipalities to more easily sprawl, could allow the use of ministerial zoning orders to bypass some drinking water protection rules.

And it said the More Homes Built Faster Act, introduced the year prior under Bill 23, limited the power of conservation authorities to stop developments that could harm water sources.

Ontario’s Auditor General released a report in March which found the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks doesn’t have the capacity to regularly inspect all 1,816 non-municipal drinking water systems it regulates.

Some communities in Ontario, like Six Nations of the Grand River, still do not have safe drinking water at all.

Meanwhile, the Ford government called on the federal government earlier this year not to entrench the right to clean drinking water in law.

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Like most of us, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson drinks water every day. 

It’s an ordinary act. But the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist says it’s also a deep expression of our connection to the natural world.

In recent years, Simpson has come to see her body as a node that “connects, through water, to every other living being and every other group of people on the planet,” she said during an interview with Métis artist Christi Belcourt at the Toronto Reference Library in April, adding that “our women have been walking around lakes and bringing attention to water for years and years and years.” 

The intuition that water is a connective force has grounded Simpson’s recent work, from her 2021 record Theory of Ice, which was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, to her latest book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. In that book, Simpson listens to and learns from water as she imagines a world beyond the myriad social injustices of our time. She draws on her deep familiarity with Nishnaabe knowledge and lifeways — learned in part through a decades-long apprenticeship with Doug Williams, an Elder from Curve Lake First Nation near Peterborough, Ont. — and brings it to bear on our shared contemporary moment.

Simpson has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Manitoba, and adds her latest record, Live Like the Sky — released this Friday, Oct. 24 — to a long list of artistic accomplishments.

As Simpson awaited the album’s release, she took a moment to answer The Narwhal’s Moose Questionnaire. Here’s what she had to say about land-based learning, making awe a regular practice and the items in her “emotional support backpack.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All opinions are the subject’s own.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

This is a dorky answer but the most awe-inspiring natural sight I’ve witnessed is mino bimaadiziwin — the continuous rebirth and reproduction of life on our shared planet. The ecological network that reproduces life. The water cycle. The moon. The spiritual and material strains that connect us. Our only responsibility is to live within that system and bring forth more life. Not just human life, but all life.

For me the trick is to find awe and inspiration in every piece of the natural world and in every Indigenous homeland and body of water, regardless of how much harm they carry from extraction, neglect and exploitation.

Also monarch butterflies. The whole “being soup in a tiny sleeping bag hanging on a milkweed plant to rebuild yourself into the most fragile weird flying saucer thing that travels en masse to Mexico, and knows how to wing your way across Lake Ontario as a warm-up.” Like come on, do that humans.

Also I was at the Mnoominkewin Festival at Curve Lake First Nation in September celebrating wild rice. I was down on the shore of Chemong Lake and a large group of participants were in canoes planting seeds in a growing rice bed. That was a tremendous thing to witness. The wild rice on that lake used to be so thick the lake looked like a prairie. That was all destroyed by the Trent Severn Waterway, cottage development and pesticides, so to see this resurgence of a cherished Nishnaabeg way of caring for our community was pretty wonderful.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

The Sakiya project is a land-based education project in the West Bank in Palestine, whose vision is: “Liberation through a society whose confidence is rooted in traditional and contemporary ecological practices, whose tolerance echoes nature’s diversity, whose generosity springs from collective labour, whose creativity is enriched by the intersections between art, science and agriculture and whose prosperity is shared beyond boundaries.” 

I visited the centre during the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2023 and really loved to see all the ways they were deepening their connection to their homeland, to cultural production and creative practice and to sharing that knowledge.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill. 

I’d put tobacco down and ask a moose to give up its life for me, so that I could share the meat, bones, hide and nose with people in our communities. One moose can nourish a lot of people.

I’d live in sin with a beaver. Their orange chisel-like incisors! Their nictitating membrane! Nishnaabeg people have a story of someone who married a beaver and we gained a tremendous insight into how to live with beavers as a result. 

I’d kiss a lynx, entirely because I think the shyness and reluctance on both of our parts would make consent and the actual kiss next to impossible to pull off.

Outdoor cats: yes or no?

All the power to lynxes, bobcats, mountain lions and cougars.

Name one person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to.

All the fascists, elected officials, genocide deniers, billionaires and tech bros. 

And all of us. If each one of us found three people and organized to make something in our local communities better, we would be making a different future.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

The Great Lakes made me.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?

This is another dorky answer. I turned off the robots and looked up the actual study, and read it because I highly recommend critical thought. This study is dated. It focused on men and women in the United States. It conforms to a colonial gender binary and erases queer and gender fluid identities. It seems to not account for other factors like race, education level and socio-economic factors. 

The study does clock a change in 2010. Apparently, prior to 2010, men and women had a similar knowledge of climate change and then it shifted, and the study suggests women in the U.S. are less likely than men to know certain scientific facts about climate change. This is another red flag to me because it’s conforming to the Barbie-is-bad-at-math kind of misogyny. We also know that in our present moment, climate deniers, genocide deniers, science deniers, MAGA people and the right target and recruit young white men and that they were successful in getting Trump elected. That’s the issue we should be studying and organizing against. 

In Indigenous communities all genders are concerned about climate change because our ancestors saw it was going to be a huge problem once settlers set foot on Turtle Island, disregarded our sovereignties, laws and ethical practices and imposed colonialism and capitalism on us. 

Sorry, I went all professor there.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?

I’m wishing for the empty Pacific.

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

I’m on the road a lot and so my backpack is actually an emotional support backpack, jammed with everything from portable chargers to nail clippers to tea bags to a portable espresso maker. One time my emotional support backpack broke in the Vancouver airport and the 4,000 items in it were spilling out as I was running for a connecting flight. I ended up having to buy a large tote bag which my kids call “the millennial mom bag,” even though it’s pretty obvious from this answer I’m generation X.

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?

I spent a lot of time in the North teaching in Denendeh, Kaska Dena territory and Inuvik, which is part of Gwichi’in and Inuvialuit homelands, for the Dechinta Centre of Research and Learning, which is based in Yellowknife. It’s an Indigenous-led, land-based post-secondary education program. We take Elders, students and their children out on the land to learn from and with the land in a multi-generational Indigenous context.

The students spend part of the day learning from Elders and part of the day learning from people like me, and they can earn Indigenous Studies credits from the University of British Columbia. We provide childcare, meals, accommodation and all kinds of academic and wellness support to ensure that we are channelling resources into northern Indigenous communities and to make sure our programming is meaningful to people of all genders and sexual orientations. 

I’ve also done writing workshops in Sapmi (northern Finland, Sweden and Norway). I think the farthest north I’ve been is Tuktoyaktuk in Inuvialuit territory but it might be Igloolik in Nunavut. This year I helped teach hide-tanning courses in Inuvik with Montana and Delaney Prynuk. It was pretty amazing tanning hides near the former sites of residential schools.

What’s one way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?

I drink water. Every day.

Yes, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup?

Maple smoked salmon.

Would you rather be invited to visit David and Victoria Beckham at their Muskoka, Ont., cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex at their B.C. oceanic escape?

No.

Camping: yes or no?

Yes.

Enjoying the Moose Questionnaire? Read more from the series here.

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Last year, while completing a wetland assessment with the B.C. Wildlife Federation in the highlands above sw̓iw̓s (Osoyoos, B.C.), Delaney Hall came across the remnants of an old beaver dam along Coteay Creek.

As he continued on along the now-depleted waterway, Hall identified evidence of 36 more former dams, all of which were abandoned along a five-kilometre stretch.

Of those 37, 20 of them are still in good enough condition to be patched up. Some have already been repaired, enabling them to hold back water to create the ponds and reservoirs that make dams so valuable to wetland ecosystems. 

About 15 kilometres downstream from the Mount Baldy Ski Resort, Coteay Creek quietly meanders through a large open field. This area surrounding the creek has become more like a grassland as the wetland has dried up and the beavers — or stunx as they’re known in nsyilxcən, the language of the syilx nations — have disappeared.

“There haven’t been beavers up here for like 30-plus years,” said Hall, a tmixʷ (wildlife) technician with the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a tribal council representing eight member communities.

“There used to be millions and millions of beavers, and now there’s not very many up in the highlands anymore.”

But by mimicking beaver structures, people are determined to coax them back, explained Hall.

“Once you start restoring some of this area, the vegetation starts coming back. And beavers have been known to take over after,” he said.

In the second week of September, Hall led a project with the tribal council, Osoyoos Indian Band and the B.C. Wildlife Federation. The team installed eight manufactured beaver dams along a one-kilometre stretch of Coteay Creek in this open field, in an effort to help revitalize the surrounding wetland’s ecosystem. 

Between the human-made dam structures — also known as beaver dam analogues — the crew also implemented eight additional artificial creek obstructions to mimic natural log jams. They’re known as post-assisted log structures.

“When trees fall over into the creek, it directs the water to the side,” Hall, who’s a member of Osoyoos Indian Band, said.

“We’re using that to help widen out the system, because it’s so low.”

‘The glue that holds habitats together’

Coteay Creek is a tributary of akskʷəkʷant (Inkaneep Creek), which flows into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake). The headwaters of both Coteay and Inakneep creeks are located just below Mount Baldy.

Before the fur trade and settler colonialism decimated the population of beavers in syilx homelands, the semi-aquatic rodents and their dams played a critical role in the ecological functions of local wetlands.

“There used to be like 400 million beavers they estimate, in the country,” Hall said.

“And now, there’s a huge difference,” noting that there’s roughly 12 to 15 million left.

Hall estimates that up to 90 per cent of the province’s wetlands have been lost, and he said much of that loss is linked to the disappearance of beavers from the landscape.

“They had wetlands all over the place, like in every waterway,” he explained. “People need to understand that beavers are a keystone species.” 

“They are the glue that holds habitats together.”

Just a few steps from a turn in the creek and into the field, what appears to be a small mound in the ground to the untrained eye is actually the remnants of the lowest beaver structure in Coteay Creek’s former beaver dam system.

Upon finding the former natural beaver dams, Hall spoke with some Osoyoos Indian Band Elders, who pointed on a map to where they’d previously seen signs of beavers.

“You talk to some of the Elders, they remember beavers in places where the evidence is totally gone now,” he said.

The spot one of the Elders identified “was the exact same place I was talking about,” he said.

He recounted the Elder telling him, “Years ago, that whole [area] — where there’s no trees and stuff — that was all underwater, that was all beaver dam. It was an old wetland back there.”

When beavers are allowed to build their dams unimpeded, those structures act like speed bumps to slow a stream’s flow. They result in pools that hold water along a waterway’s route, Hall said. 

“Beavers create the environment that best suits them,” he explained. “If you ever see a beaver on land, it waddles pretty slow.”

Pools of deeper water are an ideal place for the rodents to swim freely, where they build their dens and canals, the latter serving as  “highways for beavers,” according to Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota.

The canals are “little micro streams” that stem from beaver ponds, “across valley bottoms and different landscapes,” Fairfax explained at a webinar hosted by the tribal council in July.

“The pond is definitely a very large and important surface water feature, but the canals take a beaver from influencing half a square kilometre of land, to influencing multiple square kilometres of land,” she said.

Their dams slow down flowing water, spreading it out into floodplains and wetlands.

“It helps recharge the ground water and it slowly releases it over time,” Hall said.

“When you don’t have any of that in a stream system, the water starts to channelize and then it starts to dig itself down.” 

In other words, streams become faster without beaver dams — they widen and straighten, rather than meander, and contribute to the erosion of a stream’s bed.

Beaver dams make landscapes fire-resistant

Wetlands are critical habitat not just for other aquatic beings such as fish and amphibians, but also land animals, including moose, deer and elk, Hall explained.

But with more frequent droughts causing a growing number of streams to dry up, he said “it’s hard out here for the animals.”

“We see them as our relatives,” he added. “They help us sustain our lives, so we gotta help take care of them as well.”

And since beaver dams enable wetlands to keep their surrounding lands moist and green, they act as natural fire breaks, too. 

Fairfax said that beaver-dammed areas are about three times more fire-resistant than rivers without beavers.

She explained that during “megafires,” ecosystems with beaver activity in them offer significant protection from wildfires, becoming what are called “fire refugia” — areas that remain mostly unburned, or experience only low-intensity fires.

“That is helpful and beneficial for the soil and the organisms,” she said.

“It’s really important to have fire refugia available. These are the places that animals will seek out to survive the fire, especially those that can’t outrun a fire.”

Additionally, devastating floods and droughts are less likely to occur where there are multiple beaver dams along a waterway, because their structures slow water down and spread it out into the ground, absorbing water and holding it. 

A wetland is “like a giant sponge,” Hall said, “it just soaks it all up, and slowly releases it over time.”

Beaver dams help cool water temperatures for salmon

In watersheds’ highlands, beaver dams also help regulate water temperatures downstream, because they store cooler water up higher for longer periods, slowly releasing it throughout the whole year instead of all at once. 

This cold water filtering into waterways also supports salmon as they return to spawn, which thrive in cooler temperatures.

“When we had beavers in the system,” Hall said, “we had more fish than we could count.”

But with a lack of beaver dams slowing and holding water, as is the case at Coteay Creek, the water descending from its headwaters flows “so fast now,” Hall lamented.

“More material and sediments have been filling our rivers, which has been destroying fish habitat.”

Snowpacks in the territory are already melting more quickly due to warming temperatures brought on by climate change. But Hill said clearcut logging in the headwaters is accelerating this process. 

Not only do tree canopies reduce local temperatures, but as more snowmelt and rain run off deforested parts of watersheds, these areas also suffer from further erosion due to cattle grazing, and landslides linked to flooding — all of which increases waterflow in streams and creeks, he explained. 

“It has degraded them, and they have suffered lots of erosion,” he said.

“Now we are faced with less snow every year.”

And unless watersheds are protected from top to bottom, he argued, “it will continue to be an uphill battle.”

“There are such huge cumulative impacts in the upper watershed from forestry, mining — all the other users,”qʷəqʷim̓cxn Tessa Terbasket, the siwɬkʷ (water) program lead for Okanagan Nation Alliance, said. 

“But also climate change — these megafires that have been going through and changing the water.”

‘Imitate the beaver’

Terbasket said that protecting upper watersheds throughout the territory should be a priority.

“There’s less things up there now that hold the water back and slow the water down in the watershed,” she said.

“Our system here is very dependent on that — if the water’s not being held up there, and we’re not getting that much snowpack, that means that we are in a drought for the year.”

While frogs, rainbow and brook trout can be spotted within Coteay Creek, most of the four-legged animals found roaming its nearby fields nowadays are cows and wild horses, with black bears and their cubs seen occasionally, too.

On top of the lack of maintained beaver dams slowing the creek’s flow, years of cattle trampling across Coteay Creek have also eroded the creekbed, cutting up to two metres into the ground in places.

Knowing beaver dams’ ability to help naturally maintain the creek’s health and keep water in the wetlands, Hall felt this stretch of the waterway would be the perfect spot to install human-made structures to mimic a beaver dam’s functions.

‘Dirt lasagna’: How to fake a beaver dam

Beaver dam analogues are built by packing layers upon layers of locally harvested fir branches with mud from the creek. The mud is spread and firmed along the upstream side of the structure, reinforcing it and enabling water to slowly trickle down on its other side. 

“Basically, we’re trying to imitate the way a beaver dam is built,” said Hall.

Leanne McDonald, a biologist with the federation, compared the technique to a “dirt lasagna.”

“The [beaver dam analogues] are here to help hold back that water, so that it’s not straight-shooting further down,” the intermediate restoration biologist explained.

The federation has been installing the analogues in waterways across the province for years through their 10,000 Wetlands project.

But the beaver mimicry initiative in Coteay Creek was the first such pilot installation for Okanagan Nation Alliance, which hopes will lead to similar projects in upper watersheds throughout its territories.

“We want to be doing it shoulder-to-shoulder with everybody,” Terbasket said, “because we just see that we need to be doing this work. It just makes so much sense.”

On Sept. 10, McDonald was among five B.C. Wildlife staff members on site to train their Okanagan Nation Alliance and Osoyoos Indian Band counterparts on the technique. 

Natural resource officers with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band also joined the crew later that week, hoping to take the idea back to their own watersheds.

“We would love for [Okanagan Nation Alliance] to be able to do this themselves,” McDonald said, “to have the capacity and the know-how to go find these sites.”

‘It’s really rewarding work’

The team also installed large poles to strengthen both the beaver dam analogues and post-assisted log structures, to keep them in place and to deter cattle from walking across the structures. 

Cattle crossing the waterway has caused a lot of “degradation that we’re seeing” in the creek, McDonald said.

“We’re hoping that by raising the water levels, it will discourage them from wanting to walk through here,” she said.

Their efforts started to pay off quickly. As they installed the structures over a week, they soon noticed the water level beginning to rise, with pools starting to slowly fill in. 

“It’s immediate satisfaction and gratification building these structures,” McDonald said. “You see the results immediately. It’s really rewarding work.”

The pools behind each artificial beaver dam are also designed to trap sediment as water trickles through. That sediment will help raise up the creek bottom, increasing water levels with it and helping restore nearby floodplains.

As the creek waters widen further into their adjacent flats, the hope is for the analogues to trap sediments and encourage the waterway to meander across the plain.

“The more the water meanders, the better it spreads it out,” Hall explained. “It gets everything greener in a wider area.”

As the structures were being built, the crews regularly used a staff gauge to measure a pool’s water levels on the downstream side of each beaver dam analogue, to see how much water was flowing through it.

“We constantly check to make sure that the water hasn’t dropped too much,” Hall said.

“If it starts to go down one or two [centimetres], then we stop and let the pool fill up, and let it start going over the top again. Let the flow do its thing again, and then we’ll start to build it up.”

Crews were careful not to build the beaver dam analogues too tall too fast, however, as the structures could blow out come spring when freshet meltwaters make their way down from the headwaters. 

They plan to return next year to build them back up, and address any broken or sediment-clogged dams.

The goal, Hall said, is to prevent the dams from fully blocking the flow.

“It’s always constant,” he said. “After they’re all built in, the flow never changes … It’s the same amount of water going through. It just slows it down.”

McDonald said they’ll check on the structures twice more next year, during high flows in the spring and low flows in the fall. They’ll also gather data and do any needed maintenance, such as adding more layers.

Eventually, Hall said they want to build beaver dam analogues farther upstream, closer to the headwaters, which would extend the dams’ current one-kilometre stretch six-fold.

“We want to start at the headwaters and keep more of that cold water up in the high country for longer,” he said. “That’s the goal.”

Return of the beaver

The analogues can survive from between two to 15 years, McDonald said. 

The secret to even longer-lasting structures, however, is to attract actual beavers.

That, she said, “is the ultimate goal” — to “have beavers on the landscape maintaining them for you.”

Fairfax, at the University of Minnesota, agreed restoring the species to local watersheds is vital.

“You shouldn’t be building their structures,” she said, “if you don’t want the beavers back.” 

Hall and McDonald both envision a day when the large rodents return to their former habitats, ideally to take over maintaining the artificial structures — and once again steward their surrounding wetlands.

“Beavers are attracted to the sound of water, and that’s where they go,” said Terbasket.

Although it might be hard to imagine how beavers would find their way to a dam analogue on a creek they’ve not used in years, McDonald said there’s “a great opportunity” in the province because the species are often seen as a “nuisance.”

“People are trapping beavers in areas where they can’t co-exist with people,” she said. 

“We can release them here and they can take over a site like this.”

But it’s not just beavers who have the potential to come back to Coteay Creek. Other wildlife are expected to return to the wetlands, too, once the structures rejuvenate the ecosystem.

Hall predicts that “all sorts” of birds would return to a healthy wetland in the area, along with other mammals such as mink, marten and muskrat.

“It’s like a magnet for all wildlife,” he said.

‘We need to act now’

One week after helping out at Coteay Creek, the B.C. Wildlife Federation crew assisted another syilx member community, Westbank First Nation, with similar beaver mimicry work, helping install beaver dam analogues in a headwater zone of the Derickson Swamp wetland system.

Terbasket said communities throughout the nation are really keen to be starting this work in their own watersheds.

“Doing beaver mimicry work in the upper watershed really seems like a no-brainer,” she said.

“Let’s learn to do this together, but also it’s so important to get our Elders’ and Knowledge Keepers’ input and direction.”

Equally crucial, she added, is “syilx-ifying” this Western-science approach to beaver mimicry, she said.

“What’s our nsyilxcen words for it?” Terbasket asked. “What’s the protocol and ceremonies that we need to also be doing for this work for it to be successful?”

She said that Elders and other community members have also said they prioritize protecting and restoring their upper watersheds. 

Hall said the nation plans to build hundreds of beaver dam analogues every year throughout their territory.

He identified the headwaters of Vaseux Creek and McIntyre Creek as other waterways that would benefit from the efforts, as they are “dangerously close to drying up in the summertime,” he said.

They’re important spawning grounds for sockeye and chinook salmon in the Okanagan River system.

“We have so many fish coming back,” he said. “Now we need all the spawning areas that we can get.”

Shuttleworth Creek has seen its waters become dangerously slow, he said, stranding hundreds of fish. 

He also listed numerous other waterways in the area that would benefit from beaver mimicry: creeks like the Shingle, Ellis, and Mission; and rivers such as the Nicola, Salmon and Similakmeen.

“We must stand up together and protect the ones that have stood up before us, to help us sustain our lives,” Hall said. “We must protect our relatives — the ones who cannot speak for themselves. For we are the caretakers of this land.”

But to take care of the Okanagan Nation’s watersheds, he warned, “We need to act now … for future generations.” And beaver dams are not just an ecosystem and climate matter, either. “Our way of life is being threatened.”

Beaver mimicry, and in turn trying to attract beavers back to their former environments, he believes, will “help make some real change.”

“More and more of our waterways have been drying up in the summertime now,” he said. “Beavers can help change that, and revive our wetlands.”

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Staccato IV beeps and electrical whirs disrupted the worried air of Chris Wemigwans’s son’s quarantined hospital room in Sudbury, Ont. 

It was 2017, and Wemigwans’s 14-year-old son had spent the past week being poked and prodded to determine what illness was ravaging his growing body. Every test only muddied potential diagnoses, but all signs pointed to meningitis. 

“My son was on death watch,” Wemigwans said.

It wasn’t until a spinal tap ruled out meningeal swelling that doctors realized what Wemigwans’s son was afflicted with: group C streptococcus. It’s a bacteria that can be transmitted from animals to humans through the respiratory tract, digestive system or skin and can cause serious infections including necrotizing fasciitis, better known as flesh-eating disease. 

Wemigwans thought back to the previous week’s activities. Looking at his son’s inflamed patches of skin, he remembered. 

Wemigwans’s son was playing manhunt in the bush of their home in Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation when he stumbled across shrubs of poison ivy and broke out in a rash. Later that day, as he’d done countless summers before, he went for a swim in the nearby north channel of Lake Huron — the community’s popular local beach.

Wemigwans had just begun working in water treatment at the community’s plant. Aundeck Omni Kaning has a reserve with just under 300 residents on Manitoulin Island, 120 kilometres southwest of Sudbury. 

Wemigwans suspects poor water quality in the channel that day caused his son’s hospitalization, but with an absence of timely water testing, he can’t say for sure.

“That shouldn’t happen. Our water should never be that dirty,” Wemigwans, whose son has since recovered, told The Narwhal. 

Despite having just begun working in water treatment at the community’s plant, Wemigwans took it upon himself to routinely test the recreational water around Aundeck Omni Kaning.     

“I wouldn’t want that to happen to anybody else,” Wemigwans said.

Water treatment operators are often unsung heroes tasked with the enormous responsibility of ensuring the communities they serve are engaging with safe, clean water. But Wemigwans also knows firsthand how precarious that protection is for many First Nations, including his own, where he has been the only water treatment operator for over the last three years. In Toronto, by contrast, this duty was shared by over 700 people in 2021. 

Water treatment plants understaffed across Ontario First Nations

Many Canadians are familiar with the crisis of long-term drinking water advisories in Indigenous communities across Canada. Notably, former prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to eliminate all advisories by 2021, but dozens persist in various communities — and some have lasted for years. Some also deal with wastewater contamination, which makes local fish and game unsafe to eat and increases health risks, like the infection contracted by Wemigwans’s son. The causes are complex, including infrastructure deficits and inadequate funding. But staffing the facilities that treat water, removing contaminants and bacteria, is a big piece of the puzzle. 

Across Ontario there are 340 wastewater treatment plants and 423 drinking water treatment plants as of 2018.

In Aundeck Omni Kaning, there’s just one drinking water treatment plant and it’s an entirely one man show. Wemigwans is responsible for any and all repairs, operating control systems, conducting chemical and bacterial tests and collecting water samples from surrounding lakes. He is also the only set of eyes on any and all documented operational data. 

Wemigwans says he doesn’t get sick, but if he’s ever under the weather, he’ll just come in anyways. 

“There’s no one here to infect,” said Wemigwans — and it’s not like he has much choice. 

Wemigwans is entitled to four weeks of time off. However, to use his vacation time, he must coordinate with the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising’s technical services department in advance.

The tribal council’s water hub is a team of three people who are responsible for covering staffing gaps and assisting with intensive repairs for all of their six member nations, including Aundeck Omni Kaning. 

This delicate staffing dance is not a new problem. In fact, the current water operator capacity situation with the tribal council is actually quite an improvement from where they started over a decade ago. 

While there is no available data on the staffing shortage for water treatment plants on reserves, the issue is pervasive. Kevin Debassige, technical services manager for the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising, said that leadership has been looking for pathways to build staffing capacity since 2014. 

“Before we started this, we pretty much only had one operator at every plant,” said Debassige.

In 2018, a partnership between United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising and Water First, a non-profit organization, launched to provide 10 Indigenous youth with the opportunity to graduate from a 15-month water internship program, where they’d learn the trade and obtain certification to work as operators in their communities. 

So far, 65 interns have graduated from Water First programs, which has partnered with First Nations from across Ontario and Manitoba. Next year, 10 more certified water operators will graduate into the workforce, with another internship cohort kicking off this past summer. 

However, the field is still struggling to drum up interest to meet the needs of every community. 

Dan Clark, the lead water hub operator for the tribal council, says older people he’s spoken to have expressed concerns about all of the exams and training required to receive certification, while the 24/7 on-call nature of the job, especially in communities where they would be the sole operator, seems to be a big deterrent across all age cohorts. 

However, Clark thinks a large impediment is that water treatment operation is not recognized by Skilled Trades Ontario. Clark said that recognition by the province as a skilled trade would boost awareness of the profession as a career path and potentially improve wages.

As it stands, Indigenous Services Canada says they provide financial support for “the day-to-day costs to operate and maintain water systems,” including “training and certification of water and wastewater operators” and for “ongoing operator support and retention.”

However, Ray Moreau, the infrastructure specialist for the tribal council, says government funding is “restrictive,” forcing Indigenous communities to fully cover the wages for any operators they employ in their plants.

Indigenous programs, including water treatment, risk defunding

There’s another problem on the horizon: Indigenous Services Canada funding may soon be gutted.

Last July, a leaked letter by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne revealed all cabinet ministers had been directed to “bring forward ambitious savings proposals to spend less on the day-to-day running of government, and invest more in building a strong, united Canadian economy.”

It was later confirmed the federal government is looking for $25 billion in budget cuts to fund Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Trump-extracted promise to double military expenditure, as well as offset income tax cuts for the “middle class.” 

While the Liberal government has not officially stated their intended budgetary victims, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report predicts that the Caveman Steak from Carney’s soon-to-be-slaughtered cash cow will come from “programs delivered to Indigenous Peoples” estimated at “$4.51 billion a year by 2028-29,” with Indigenous Services Canada bearing the brunt of the thrashing. 

On the flip side, the First Nations Clean Water Act has made its way back on the table. Bill C-61 looks to “recognize and affirm the inherent right of First Nations to self-government in relation to water, source water, drinking water, wastewater and related infrastructure on, in and under First Nation lands”— something Canada signed onto with the United Nations 13 years ago, but has so far failed to deliver.

The bill was halted when Trudeau prorogued Parliament to resign at the start of the year, but has since returned to the legislative floor — to mixed reactions. 

Alberta and Ontario have been very vocal in their opposition to the bill, citing concerns that focusing on water protection in Indigenous communities would hinder provincial economic goals. While the provinces haven’t stated what specific projects they’re referencing in their opposition, Alberta and Ontario have notably set their sights on hoovering up as many data centre contracts as they can. 

As of last year, Ontario is leading Alberta by 83 data centres. However, if quality is weighted heavier than quantity, Alberta may pull ahead with Kevin O’Leary’s proposal for the largest data centre in the world on Treaty 8 land, a region that’s endured severe drought lasting several years.

However, some critics worry the bill is largely symbolic, as it doesn’t include any projects to increase drinking water accessibility other than the commitment to “make best efforts to provide adequate and sustainable funding for water services on First Nation lands,” Deborah McGregor, a professor and Canada Research Chair for Indigenous Environmental Justice at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, told The Narwhal.

She said that C-61 is a solid step forward, but that it may not be able to compete with all the federal backward steps like Indigenous Services Canada budget cuts and Bill C-5.

“You’re having all this investment and trying to protect drinking water, but then at the same time, you’re opening up a whole bunch of First Nations land to resource extraction, which contaminates the water,” McGregor said.

“Like, what do you think is going to happen?”

C-61 seems to have learned from the mistakes of the 2013 Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, McGregor explains, a process that did not adequately consult Indigenous communities about what would best serve them. In Bill C-61, it’s unclear whether the nations who need the most help with their water infrastructure — remote communities — will receive it.

Many First Nations still under boil-water advisories

Unlike the member nations of the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising, or the First Nations supported by the Ontario First Nations Technical Services Corporation, remote Indigenous communities are a special case because their locale forces them to be dependent on the federal government. When their water infrastructure fails them, they must wait for the government to act.    

Neskantaga First Nation, a community with a similar number of members living on reserve as Aundeck Omni Kaning, has been waiting for 30 years and counting, living under the longest boil-water advisory in the country. The advisory was issued just two years after the nation’s water treatment plant opened in 1993, when tests showed high levels of harmful chemicals. 

Similarly, Attawapiskat First Nation, whose number of on-reserve members is more than six times that of Aundeck Omni Kaning, also has a water treatment plant, but the amount of necessary repairs have piled up over time. Six years ago, the nation declared a drinking water crisis when testing showed high levels of harmful chemicals leaching from their ailing treatment plant, though residents say that Attawapiskat’s water has been undrinkable for much longer than six years. 

McGregor is unsure whether Carney’s regime is prepared to craft equitable solutions to improve the material conditions in remote communities. 

“[There’s] a lack of working with the people to make sure that you’re not taking a techno fix that works in a southern First Nation and popping it up north and calling it a day,”  McGregor said.

As Bill C-61 wends through Parliament, 40 Ontario communities are currently under boil-water advisories: 28 long-term and 14 short-term as of Sept. 16. 

In Aundeck Omni Kaning, Wemigwans is enjoying some company at his treatment plant for the first time in years: a fellow community member has joined him as a Water First intern.

When his intern graduates from the program, they will become a permanent water operator at the band’s plant and will eventually take over Wemigwans’s position when he retires.

With billions of dollars in budget cuts hanging in the balance, it’s unclear how programs like Water First will be affected. 

In the meantime, Wemigwans is looking forward to not being the lone protector between his community and waterborne illness — and more flexibility with his schedule.   

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When Scott Driver began work as fire chief in Cranbrook, B.C., in 2019, his mission was crystal clear: protect his town’s residents and buildings from fire. But it wasn’t until 2022, when a wildfire threatened the mountainside that collects his town’s drinking water, that he realized that in this warming climate, his responsibilities extend far beyond the city limits. 

The BC Wildfire Service was preparing to do everything it could to stop the rapidly growing flames of the Connell Ridge fire. There was just one problem, Driver says. That same slope it was about to raze, burn and dump retardants on was the main source of tap water for Cranbrook, supplying its 20,000 residents with drinking water. 

That’s when a light bulb switched on for him. “Not only do I have to protect the citizens in their houses and our infrastructure, but I have to protect the ability for them to stay in their house and drink water, cause it’s a piece of life,” he recalls thinking. 

He quickly brought his city’s water manager into the fire incident management team and BC Wildfire Service amended its action plan. This isn’t about houses, this is about drinking water, Driver remembers telling them.

The hotter a fire burns, the more the charred soil repels water long after the flames are extinguished. That leads to more sediment washing into streams, more harmful bacteria and warmer water — all of which make it harder and more expensive to treat drinking water. One study from the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found once one-fifth of a watershed’s footprint is burned in severe fire, it will experience increased runoff and water flows, which worsens water quality downstream as the healthy soils and vegetation that absorb and filter water are burned away. 

As climate change combines with decades of rapidly putting out most wildfires — leaving forests packed with dry fuel — the ripple effects are showing up in our tap water. Last summer, discoloured tap water flowing out of faucets in West Kelowna was likely caused by the wildfire that scorched the slopes feeding into the Rose Valley reservoir the previous summer, according to a city statement. 

An analysis by a team of environmental scientists published earlier this year examined 245 burned watersheds across the United States and found organic carbon and phosphorus remained elevated for five years post-fire, while nitrogen and sediment levels remained elevated for up to eight years. The scientists, from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado, found nitrogen levels in the surface water from watersheds burned in the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest recorded in the state’s history at the time, were still elevated almost 15 years after the fires.In emergency planning, responders plan around safeguarding critical infrastructure assets, but Driver sees a dangerous blind spot in B.C. when it comes to what’s considered critical. “The natural asset of a watershed isn’t currently top of mind for most,” he says. “That’s as important as the schools and the hospital.”

Wildfires are a threat to water security

Fortunately this is still a theoretical concern for Driver, but in many parts of the province, it’s already an issue. Most cities and towns in B.C. depend on reservoirs which collect surface water — the water we can see that comes from rain, melting snow, rivers, lakes and streams. There are more than 466 community watersheds in the province that supply many British Columbians with their water. “You cannot have a community without water,” Robert Gray, a wildland fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, B.C., explains. “The reality is we’re going to be facing more and more of these kinds of crises where we’ve had a significant impact to the watershed.”

In 2023, Canada’s worst wildfire season by a long shot, a record 2.84 million hectares burned in B.C. alone, an area almost as large as all of Vancouver Island. Of that total, 13,970 hectares burned in the Grouse Complex Wildfire that included the McDougall Creek fire in West Kelowna.

Following concerted firefighting efforts, West Kelowna’s brand new $75-million Rose Valley water treatment plant was spared, but the forested watershed which feeds the water plant was not so lucky. About 95 per cent of that watershed burned, a significant change to the landscape which has worsened water quality in the reservoir, increasing turbidity and concentrations of manganese — an unwelcome legacy expected to persist for at least five years after the burn, if not longer.

“We know the land surrounding the Rose Valley reservoir has been damaged because of the wildfire in 2023, and it means the contaminated source of water can be harder to treat because of the sediment, nutrients, metals and organic matter as a result of burned material,” Interior Health medical health officer Dr. Fatemeh Sabet told West Kelowna city council in June this year. 

In 2009, one of the main watersheds that supplied water to Lillooet, B.C., burned extensively in the Mount McLean fire. As a result, its water was contaminated by ash and fire retardant and was unusable altogether. It forced the district to ban water for irrigation in the short term to stretch its reduced water capacity. Since then, the town has developed alternative water sources with the help of $10 million in federal funds. 

“The frequency and intensity of the fire seasons has been overwhelming for a lot of us,” J. Ivor Norlin tells The Narwhal. As head of the drinking water systems program at B.C.’s Interior Health Authority, he’s seen an increase in impacts on water systems due to wildfires. “If it happened once in a while we might be able to focus resources. Now it’s happening every other year, or every three years, and it’s just more and more and more,” he says. In cases like West Kelowna’s McDougall Creek fire, the connection between the fire that burned in August 2023 and the rusty-coloured water with elevated manganese levels that poured out of the tap the following summer was clear. For other water quality impacts, it’s harder to connect the dots. 

Norlin says water managers are seeing the water quality in the entire Okanagan area change in recent years — everything from an increase in water temperatures to spikes in phosphorus and fine sediment have been documented. While the region saw dramatic wildfires in 2017, 2021 and again in 2023, whether these changes in the lake’s water are due entirely to wildfire, or a confluence of extreme weather events, is hard to pin down. “It’s also just part of those broader climate change impacts and just our reality of a shifting environment,” he says. It’s not just B.C. seeing water impacts from wildfires. The fire that struck Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2016 left a huge burn scar on either side of the Athabasca River from which the town’s water is collected. “The water treatment plant there is still dealing with the effects of that fire now,” Juliette O’Keeffe, a senior scientist at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health explains. “Anyone that is operating a water treatment facility has to be aware that there is always a potential for risk of a wildfire.”“It’s not just the land that is burned; you can see downstream impacts as well. Water flows downhill.”

The path to fire-resilient watersheds — and the hurdles in the way

In the cases of West Kelowna and Fort McMurray, their plants have proven robust enough to ensure adequate water treatment despite challenges posed by downstream wildfire impacts, even if they have hiked up water treatment costs. But in Cranbrook, Driver is focused on mitigating the risks upstream, where he wants to make the land more fire-resilient in the first place. 

That way, when it catches fire, it won’t burn so hot and it can bounce back more readily. “We’re not going to stop fire from hitting the landscape,” Driver says. “What we need to do is stop it from wrecking the watershed. … What we want to do is be resilient enough that we can still drink the water after the fire’s been put out.”

He and his department have already begun work to increase the resilience of the city’s water catchment, doing landscape treatments across the parcel of Cranbrook-owned forest adjacent to the town’s water reservoir. They have removed fallen logs, thinned the forest and reduced the amount of fuel available to wildfire and have plans to do more. 

“We’re … planning to do logging and prescribed burning so that if a fire comes roaring down the mountain, it doesn’t come right up to the water’s edge and contaminate the reservoir of water that we use for drinking,” he explains. 

The interior Douglas fir forests surrounding Cranbrook are fire-adapted landscapes, able to recover readily from lower-temperature wildfires. Historic tree-ring analysis shows the forests in the area experienced fire every two to three decades over a period of about 250 years. Burning was a cultural practice of the Ktunaxa, who stewarded these lands for generations, using fire to renew the landscape, improve berry harvests and increase pasture. British Columbia banned cultural burns with the Bush Fire Act of 1874 – the first province in the country to do so. 

In spring 2023, members of ʔaq̓am, a Ktunaxa community, and crews from BC Wildfire Service and Cranbrook’s fire department conducted a 1,200-hectare prescribed burn. A little more than two months later, wildfires whipped through the area. Driver believes the cultural burn reduced fuel loads across the landscape significantly enough to redirect the uncontrolled wildfire away from assets like the airport and neighbouring communities. 

A growing body of scientific evidence shows pre-emptively burning landscapes in low-severity fires lowers their risk of experiencing high-severity fires later, including a recent study out of Stanford University which found prescribed burns lowered the severity of wildfires by 16 per cent and net smoke pollution by an average of 14 per cent. Another analysis found even greater gains of a 72 per cent reduction of severe wildfire risk if forests were thinned to reduce “ladder fuels” (vegetation that can catch fire, drawing flames from the ground up into the tree canopy) and small trees before prescribed burning. 

Driver and his fire department are empowered to reduce the flammability of the parcel of land around the town’s water reservoir because it’s city-owned. But when he looks uphill to the larger watershed that Cranbrook’s citizens rely on, he’s not sure there’s any path he can pursue to make that watershed fire-resistant, because it’s on Crown land. 

“What we need to do in the watersheds are fuel treatments … to mitigate or alleviate fire intensity and severity,” Gray says, adding that means thinning conifer stands, prescribed or cultural burning, converting conifer stands to hardwood or encouraging shrub fields. Most critically, it means asking the B.C. Ministry of Forests to pivot from its status quo model of timber management to more holistic ecosystem management practices that meet multiple objectives.

Currently, as both Gray and Driver note, the province will license a community to collect surface water from a watershed for its water, and with the other hand, permit a private company to harvest timber in that same watershed, with no provisions for the forestry company to log or manage that forest to mitigate its wildfire risk (whether its surface water is licensed to a community or not).

Historically, those two things — timber harvest and surface water collection — could happen in parallel without issue, but now that wildfires are threatening water security, and the best mitigation to safeguard that water source involves altering its management, the two are put in conflict. “Now your focus has to be reducing fire threat to the watershed and not just chasing timber,” says Gray. “The province should have this leadership role where they basically go to the [timber] licensee and say, the objective here in this piece is water quality and water quantity, and reduction of fire risk.” 

It’s possible for a forested watershed to be managed for both fire resilience and profitable harvests, protecting economic interests as well as water supply. In the U.S., Denver Water, the utility that provides the Denver area with clean water, spent tens of millions to repair infrastructure and remove sediment from its reservoirs in the aftermath of the 2002 Hayman Fire. It partnered with federal and state agencies in an initiative called “From Forests to Faucets” to restore fire resilience to the drainage basins that fed its reservoirs. Since 2010, the initiative has conducted treatments across 100,000 acres (roughly 40,000 hectares), ranging from planting within burned priority watersheds to fuel reduction treatments in unburned watersheds to reduce the risk of high-severity fires there.

But such an approach would require a shift in focus and new standards that the province has been unable or unwilling to negotiate for industry. “It takes an adult in the room to say, this is how we’re going to do it,” says Gray. “Right now we don’t have an adult in the room.” 

In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Forests referred The Narwhal to the newly updated “Silvicultural Systems Handbook for British Columbia” as an example of how the province is “advancing innovative silvicultural practices like selective thinning, fuel management and forest restoration” to advance its understanding “of how changes to forest, water and climate will influence sustainable resource management.” However this handbook provides guidance on best practices for practitioners, rather than enforceable regulations, and provides no specific guidance on how forests that collect surface water for communities downstream should be managed to reduce the risk from severe wildfire. 

The Ministry of Forests also pointed The Narwhal to its Forest Landscape Planning framework (its new forest management regime), which it writes gives “First Nations and non-Indigenous communities greater say in how forest management takes place in their community watersheds.”

And as Canada experiences its second-worst wildfire season on record, communities across B.C. are watching as their own watersheds are threatened and transformed by flames. 

When it comes to watershed management, Gray says, “If you hold to your current static plan, you’re already behind the eight ball.”

Updated Sept. 15, 2025, 11:35 a.m. PT: This article was updated to correct the year of a prescribed burn near Cranbrook, B.C. The burn took place in 2023.

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The B.C. government greenlit a watershed security strategy it co-developed with First Nations more than a year ago, according to an internal government document obtained by The Narwhal. But the province has failed to release the strategy despite repeated calls from First Nations partners to do so.

“I can’t tell you how deeply frustrating it is for me,” Xtli’li’ye Lydia Hwitsum, co-chair of the First Nations Water Caucus which co-developed the strategy, said in an interview. “We had done such good work.”

The BC NDP promised to develop a watershed security strategy during the 2020 election campaign. In early 2023, the province announced a $100-million endowment for a watershed security fund and launched public consultations through an intentions paper for the strategy. The paper outlined goals to strengthen local and Indigenous governance of watersheds, to build watershed knowledge and take a holistic approach to watershed management and ecosystem protection.

Cabinet approved the final strategy in early 2024, according to a December 2024 briefing document prepared for Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Minister Randene Neill, which The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request. 

A ministry spokesperson said its release was paused as the province built an implementation plan and worked to secure additional funding, but offered no timeline for when the strategy would be public. 

Aaron Hill, executive director of the conservation charity Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said “it’s very disappointing” the strategy hasn’t been released. 

“My impression of what happened is that the government got cold feet leading up to the last election and decided to put it on ice,” he said. “And that’s where it remains.”

Both Hwitsum and Hill said plans to release the watershed strategy seemed to stall amid public backlash to the government’s proposed changes to the Land Act, which would have brought the legislation in line with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. 

“When it came to our strategy, they just couldn’t get the courage together to do it,” said Hwitsum, a former chief of the Cowichan Tribes.

The ministry did not directly address these concerns in its response to The Narwhal’s questions.

Logging, urban development, climate change threaten watersheds across B.C.

In the meantime, watersheds across B.C. are under threat. Decades of clear-cut logging dramatically changed watersheds stretching from the coast through the Interior, Younes Alila, a hydrologist with the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, told The Narwhal.

“We continue to lose our forest cover in B.C. at a very alarming rate,” he said. The result is a heightened risk of floods, drought and landslides, which threaten fish and other aquatic life, alongside the communities, farms and businesses that rely on access to clean water. 

Climate change compounds those threats, particularly in watersheds transformed by extensive urban and industrial development in ways that make them less resilient to extreme weather events. 

Just two years ago, pink salmon were left stranded and struggling for oxygen as water levels in xʔəl̓ilwətaʔɬ, the Indian River, dropped to dangerous lows amid an unrelenting drought. Two years before that, extreme rainstorms battered the province leading to widespread flooding and deadly landslides. 

“The situation is really scary,” Alila said, adding there’s “no doubt” a watershed security strategy is needed. Alongside investment in watershed restoration, he said the province needs to overhaul its forestry and water management policies to address the root causes that leave watersheds across the province in such a vulnerable state.

A more holistic approach is needed now, Hwitsum said, one that is co-developed with First Nations and places Indigenous Knowledge at the forefront. 

That the strategy the First Nations Water Caucus co-developed with the B.C. government has been set aside is “hugely deflating,” she said.

“We worked really hard for that and we were ready to hold that strategy up and say look, here’s a framework,” she said. 

The water ministry spokesperson said “the province agrees that more needs to be done to support watershed security and face the scale of the water challenges in B.C.” 

Alongside exploring options to bolster the water security fund, the spokesperson noted the government is working across ministries to reform water permitting, support farmers affected by drought and invest in community water conservation projects and critical infrastructure, including flood defences.

“The province is focused on supporting watershed security alongside First Nations, local governments, stakeholders, industry and the public,” the spokesperson said.

B.C. urged to raise industry water rates to bolster watershed security fund

As the First Nations Water Caucus continues to push for the strategy to be released, Hwitsum said the group is also looking at options to grow the watershed security fund.

The fund, which is currently co-managed by the Real Estate Foundation of BC and the First Nations Water Caucus, supports a range of projects focused on ecosystem health, reconciliation, climate resilience and sustainable economies. 

Earnings from the $100-million endowment are meant to provide annual funding for grants to support projects across B.C. But applications already exceed what it can afford to support while protecting the initial investment. In its first intake round in the spring of 2024, for instance, the fund received 131 applications requesting a total of $33.8 million in funding, but was only able to fund 26 projects totalling $5 million.  

In the December briefing document prepared for Minister Neill, government officials warned the fund “must grow to meet the scale of water challenges facing B.C.”

The water ministry spokesperson said the province has asked the federal government to contribute funds and is exploring other options including increasing government revenue to fund water priorities.

Hill sees a clear path forward: the province could increase the payments industrial users are required to pay for water.

“Quebec is a great model for this,” he said. It recently raised rates for companies that use water, but don’t store it, from $2.50 to $35 per million litres.

Currently, the B.C. government charges commercial water users — including mining, oil and gas and bottled water companies — $2.25 in rent for every million litres of fresh water they take. “We’re practically giving it away to large industrial users,” Hill said. 

“This is a huge province with these massive watersheds and all kinds of threats and issues that this fund is positioned to address,” he said. “It just needs more money.”

Editor’s note: The Real Estate Foundation of BC has financially supported work by The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.